Citizens' Dialogue in Copenhagen with Commissioner Margrethe Vestager

Our society deserves a healthy competition environment

Commissioner Margrethe Vestager

On 8 March 2019, Commissioner Margrethe Vestager participated in a Citizens' Dialogue at the Royal Danish Theatre ‘The Playhouse’, with 500 attentive participants – from all ages and backgrounds.

The Dialogue was centred around “the future of Europe, IT-giants and Democracy, Men, Women and Power”. 

Commissioner Magrethe Vestager could not have wished for a better setting to mark the importance of International Women’s Day.

More than 500 curious participants had shown up in anticipation for Magrethe Vestager to reveal what her future job would be: “Well, I’m good at so many things – so let’s see what’s on offer” a smiling Vestager replied.

Moreover, on this women’s day the Commissioner emphasized that she would love to see more women in decision-making positions, since any solution reached involving both men and women in the process, always provides a sounder result.

As the debate centred on the EU Commissioner’s competition expertise, the audience wanted to understand what benefit her decisions had brought the citizens of Europe.

“As consumers we must enjoy being able to trust that competition is free, fair and based on genuine European values”, stated one participant. 

The Commissioner repudiated that the multinational companies should be considered “the enemy” – as one participant suggested; “Multinationals both contribute to and enrich our society in multiple ways, however we must ensure that they do so, while respecting our social, fiscal and environmental standards”.

A participant questioned the rationale behind the rejection of the recent German/French rail-company merger?

Commissioner Vestager first offered a perspective on how rare it is that the Commission cannot agree on a merger request - only 9 requests have been turned down out of 3 000 during the last 5 years.

The reason being, that the Commission facilitates the parties during the approval process to ensure that the EU’s legislative requirements are meet.

Concerning this actual rail merger, the two companies got the Commissions’ green light on the vast majority of aspects within the merger-request. However, the merger would create a dominant market position on ‘signals’ and ‘high-speed-trains’ that would not be in the interest of European consumers, thus the two parties decided to cancel the full merger.

The raised questions took the debate much further; the future of Europe from a Danish’s perspective, IT-giants and Democracy, Populism, Men, Women and Power, as well as the upcoming European Parliament Election.

The Commissioner concluded the Dialogue by encouraging all to participate in the upcoming election.